Now an app by engineering students to find blood donors quickly!

New Delhi: Five engineering and architecture students have come up with an app which is not only quite useful but can be a lifesaver in time of need. Called Bloodline, it helps you find blood donors within half an hour of placing your request.

Until now, people call up friends, place request on social media and office networks, and enquire blood banks to arrange the required blood. The entire process is slow, stressful and frustrating. Identifying the need of the hour, these students have developed Bloodline app to improve the efficacy of the process many times over so that users can get results within 30 minutes.

Students who developed Bloodline app include three students from IIT Madras. These students are:

Name	Institution	Photo
R. Sheeba	Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering	ÂÂ
Priyanka Gopalan	MEASI Academy of Architecture	ÂÂ
S. Siddharth	IIT Madras	ÂÂ
Ashwin Krishnamoorthy	IIT Madras	ÂÂ
Vasant Sridhar	IIT Madras	ÂÂ

Bloodline Labs was ideated for a business plan competition called Transform Urban India 2012 at IIT Madras canteen. It was hosted by Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Bangalore in August last year. It emerged as a winner overtaking entries from some of the prominent business schools.

Since then, the project has won many acclamations for the team. It was invited to be a part of the Stanford Innovation Expo 2012 held in December. In January this year, Bloodline was chosen as one of the ideas for NASSCOM’s Social Innovation Honour. Soon after its launch on August 2, 2013, it was featured on Wired U.K too.

Three more IIT Madras students have joined the team now – Junaid, Abdeali and Arun. Students bore the cost of developing the app, hiring the server and its publicity through internships. They also promote Bloodline by putting up stalls and are in talks with blood banks to adopt the technology.

The app can presently be used on Android phones and the Web and will soon be launched on iOS and MS Windows too. Users can log on to the ‘bloodlinelabs’ website or use the android app to place the request, which asks for your location, blood group you need and number of units you need. This info is pinged to all the donors in the database who can ‘accept’ and ‘reject’ the request.

Bloodline also takes into account whether the donor has already donated blood recently or is located too far from the location of the user. It does not disturb donors when they activate privacy settings.

Available for free, Bloodline has already saved 48 lives and already has about 1100 people in its network in just three months of its existence.

This post was written by Aditya Singhal, managing director of askIITians.